Phidias (part IV)

The
meeting of life and of the accessible heavens, this ideal realized on the face
of the temples and in the intelligence of the heroes, was to flower, for the
glory of the Greeks and the demonstration of the unity of the soul, on a
political plane of struggle and liberation. Democracy is not fully victorious
and consequently it is already on the road to decline, but Greece makes the
effort from which democracy is to be born. With the wooden idols and the
multicolored monsters of the old temples came the death of the oligarchy, the
power delegated to a caste which, at bottom, symbolized accepted revelation.
Tyranny, which, in Greece, is government by one man whose science has been
recognized, the system whose apogee coincides, in the fourth century, with the
determination of sculptural science—tyranny is shaken when the movement of life
invades the archaic form. The first statues to stir are those of Harmodios and
Aristogiton, the men who killed the King of Athens. Then the crushing forces
which Aeschylus set like blocks upon the human soul are shaken, with Sophocles,
to penetrate one another, to act on one another, and to cause their balanced
energy to radiate in consciousness and will. Then Phidias transports into
marble the poise of life, and man is ripe for liberty. Democracy appears—the
transitory political expression of the antagonism and the agreement of forces
in the cosmic harmony.

Then
from every Acropolis a Parthenon arises. The chief of the democracy inspires
them, the people work at them, the humblest stonecutter gets the same pay, as
Ictinos the architect, or Phidias the sculptor. At the Panatheniac festivals,
with the ritual order ill observed by the enthusiastic populace, in the dust
and the sunlight, to the often discordant sound of Oriental music and the
thousand bare feet striking the ground, with the brutal splendor of the dyed
robes, the jewels, the rouge, and the fruits, the city sends to the Parthenon
its hope—with the young girls scattering flowers, waving palms, and singing
hymns, its strength with the horsemen, and its wisdom with the old men. The
protecting divinity is to be thanked for having permitted the meeting and
sanctioned the accord between man and the law.

The
temple sums up the Greek soul. It is neither the house of the priest as the
Egyptian temple was, nor the house of the people as the cathedral is to be; it
is the house of the spirit, the symbolic refuge where the wedding of the senses
and the will is to be celebrated. The statues, the paintings—all the plastic
effort of the intelligence—is used to decorate it. The detail of its construction
is the personal language of the architect. Its principle is always the same,
its proportions are always similar, it is the same spirit that calculates and
balances its lines. Here the Doric genius dominates, by the austere
unornamented column, broad and short; there the Ionic genius smiles in it,
through the long column, graceful as a jet of water and gently expanded at its
summit. Sometimes young girls, inclining toward one another as they walk,
balance the architrave on their heads, like a basket of fruit. Often it has
columns on only one or two faces; at other times they surround it entirely.
Whether it is large or small, its size is never thought of. We are tempted to
say that the law of Number, which it observes with such ease, is innate with it;
one would say that the law springs from this very soil as the shafts rise in
their vertical flight between the stylobate and the architrave, that it is the
law itself which halts them, and which hangs suspended in the pediment with a
sort of motionless balance. The law of Number easily places the temple in the
scale of the material and spiritual universe of which it is the complete
expression. It is on a plane with the pure gulf which, at its base, rounds a
curve formed by the cadenced wave that comes to sweep the blond sand. It is on
a plane with its own promontory, which turns violet or mauve according to the
hour, but is always defined against space by a continuous line, which the bony
structure of the earth marks out distinctly. It is on a plane with the day sky,
which outlines the regularity of its rectangle in the ring of the horizon of
the sea. It is on a plane with the night sky which turns about it according to
the musical and monotonous rhythm in which the architect has discovered the
secret of its proportions. It is on a plane with the city, for which it
realizes, with a strange serenity, the perfect equilibrium vainly sought by its
citizens in the essential antagonism of classes and parties.

It is
on a plane with the poets and thinkers, who seek the absolute relationship
between the heart and the intelligence in tragedy and dialogue, to which it is
related by the drama of its sculptural decoration, irrevocably inscribed in its
definite order. On the simple Acropolis it is a harmony that crowns another
harmony. After twenty-five centuries it remains what it was, because it has
retained its proportions, its sustained sweep, its strong seat on the great
slabs of stone that dominate the sea surrounded by golden hills. One might say
that the years have treated it as they have treated the earth, despoiling it of
its statues and of its colors at the same time that they have carried the
forests and the soil of the mountains down to the sea and dried up the
torrents. One might say that the years have burned it as they have burned the
skeleton of the soil which crops out everywhere under the reddish grass—that
eight hundred thousand days of flame have penetrated it to make it tower over
the conflagration of the evening, seeming to mount even higher the lower the
sun descends.

If one
has not lived in the intimacy of its ruins, one thinks the Greek temple as
rigid as a theorem. But as soon as we really know it—whether almost intact or
shattered—our whole humanity trembles in it. The reason is that from its base
to its summit the theorem bears the trace of the hand. As in the pediments, the
symmetry is only apparent, but equilibrium reigns and makes it live. The laws
of sculpture, the laws of nature, are found in it, with logic, the energy and
silence of the planes, the quiver of their surfaces. The straight line is
there, as solid as reason, the spacious curved line also, reposeful as the
dream. The architect secures the stability of the edifice by its rectangular
forms, he gives it movement by its hidden curves. The sweep of the columns is
oblique; they project a little, one beyond the other, like the trees of an
avenue. An insensible curve rounds off the architrave at the line of their
summit. All these imperceptible divergences, with the fluting of the columns—a
shell which breaks the light, a stream of shadow and of fire—animate the
temple, give to it something like the beating of a heart. Its pillars possess
the strength and the tremor of trees; the pediments and the friezes oscillate
like the branches. The edifice, hidden behind the curtain of the columns,
resembles the mysterious forest which opens at the moment one enters it. The
temple of Paestum, which is quite black, has the appearance of an animal
walking.

Thus,
from the living temple to the eternal men who people its pediments and march in
the circle of its friezes, Greek art is a melody. Man's action is fused with
his thought. Art comes from him, as does his glance, his voice, and his breath,
in a kind of conscious enthusiasm; which is the true religion. So lucid a faith
exalts him that he has no need to cry it forth. His lyrism is contained,
because he knows the reason of its existence. His certitude is that of the
regular force which causes torrents of desire and the flowers to spring from
beings and from the soil. And the Apollo, who arises from the pediment of
Olympia with the calm and the sweep of the sun as it passes the horizon, and
whose resplendent gesture dominates the fury of the crowds, is like the spirit
of this race which, for a second, felt the reign over the chaos that surrounds
us, of the order inherent within us.

A
second! no longer, doubtless, and we cannot determine its place. It is
mysterious, it escapes our attempt to measure it, as do all human works in
which intuition plays the larger part. Did it perhaps burst out in a lost work,
perhaps in several works at once? Toward the middle of the fifth century, from
the sculptor of Olympia to Phidias, between the rise and the fall, there occurs
in the whole soul of Greece an immense oscillation round about this unseizable
moment, which passed without her being able to retain it. But she lived it, and
one or two men expressed it. And that is the maximum that a living humanity has
a right to demand of the dead humanities. It is not by following them that it
will resemble them. It may seek and discover in itself the elements of a new
equilibrium. But a mode of equilibrium cannot be rediscovered.